Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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I’m going to chime in here since I spent quite a few years as the primary videographer for the National Speakers Association – as well as having shot more “conventions” than you can shake a stick at.
If you have little experience in this particular form of torture, good luck.
Observations from time in the trenches: NO presentation will EVER proceed flawlessly as the presenter intended. NO camera operator – even the most skilled and competent – can approach anywhere close to 100% quality camera work in an typical hotel ballroom environment. (if the ceiling can lighting inconsistencies don’t get you – the room RF, the speaker who decides it’s more PERSONAL to walk out halfway into the audience where there’s NO LIGHT and hold a LONG conversation bending over a participant who’s positioned right behind a team of service personnel who totally block your shot of the speaker for five full minutes in the middle of the most critical content.)
I could spend HOURS telling you stories of shoot after shoot where even after 5 YEARS of experience and ALL the technical skills and equipment I needed, I STILL managed to find myself in situations where I got marginal results.
And don’t get me started on the clients. They’ll tell you that they’ll be there to help answer questions, and to review the raw footage and make the paper edit decisions, and they’ll promise you to work with the hotel AV people to secure better lighting/sound/scheduling/fixed table setup/power access/no large shot blocking centerpieces on the tables/ AD NAUSEUM. But you’ll STILL face problems in ALL of theses areas and more. And it will be TOTALLY up to you to notice and react to these in order to TRY and get good quality audio and video.
Look, seminar shooting (which is essentially what you’re doing) is reasonably specialized work.
My simple advice is thus:
ALWAYS have a totally dependable tape based camera – digital or analog – shoot the master shot. (My fave was a DSR-series DVCAM camera since you had the option to use 180 min tapes. NOBODY can hold their bladder longer than that and speak without needing a break!!!)
Establish not one, not two, but THREE audio feeds to that camera. A direct wireless – a board feed – AND a backup mic placed at a ceiling speaker with a quality XLR cable run to the camera position that you can swap for either the primary or secondary if one of them fails. If you don’t have two quality feeds to the camera at ALL TIMES – consider yourself in BIG trouble.
NEVER promise “final tapes before the conference is done.” ALL your clients will want that. And you may very well be able to deliver that – particularly if you know EXACTLY what you’re doing and have the right equipment and crew needed to deliver. – but STILL don’t promise it. There are just WAY too many things that can delay a tape – and most of these things will be TOTALLY out of your control.
I could go on for pages – but it’s dinner time.
Good luck.
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Another way to look at it.
Congratulations. You’ve managed to get a company to pay you a reasonable liveable wage while you accumulated an incredible range of personal skills and competencies.
Most other people would have had to spend THOUSANDS of dollars in schooling and training to assemble a similar skill set – but you’ve managed to do it on SOMEONE ELSES DIME!
BRAVO!
Now all you have to do is decide whether you want to continue to learn and progress within the conditions they’re willing to PAY YOU to do – or whether you think that you’re capable of taking this knowledge and going out in the free marketplace and see if that marketplace values the skills similarly (or even MORE than you do.)
Nobody can answer that question for you.
The only note I’ll make is this. It’s a VERY difficult market out here even for the MOST talented and accomplished people. If you’re not willing to LOSE your current position. Walk softly. Make sure you’ve secured an alternate position before you put your foot down regards demands on this one.
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Just another voice added to the chorus.
You’re doing really well for where you are.
You obviously have an eye for action and all the basic chops you need.
But I agree that while you’re having success at the structural stuff, you’re skipping over some of the real heart and soul of what makes movie making meaningful.
For example, you hardly EVER shoot your characters faces in this. And faces – and the expression on them – are one of the most fundamental keystones to keeping an audience engaged. If you don’t care about why the chase is happening, it’s just a chase. And the chase is ALWAYS about a character in danger. A character the audience has come to care about.
Keep doing what you’re doing. But also expand. Start looking at your friends and associates and school chums and consider which of them are CLOSED in their behavior and which are OPEN. Which are dull – and which are expressive. At some point, ask the expressive ones to help you by volunteering to act in your projects. When that happens, use the actions of the CHARACTERS to drive the story. Not just the action of the camera.
That will be a HUGE step forward toward professional moviemaking as you’ll see when you to go to the movies. It’s not where the CAMERA goes that makes great movies – it’s where the CHARACTERS go.
Good luck.
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And one thing that nobody’s mentioning is that even if the BAND has rights to the original material – whoever IN the band that wrote the lyrics or composed the melody’s have rights to that work. To be on safe footing you need a SIGNED RELEASE from each creator – music – and lyrics – giving the appropriate rights to incorporate their work into the whole.
Like Lennon and McCartney owning the songwriters rights to their music even tho BEATLES recordings are separately covered by sync rights, or preformance rights, or whatever.
Copyright clearance is a messy business. Always has been – always will be. Good luck.
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I had the incredible fortune to land the National Speakers Association as a client early in my career.
I spent countless hours in the back of the room manning a camera for literally hundreds of professional speakers – from motivational to humorous, from nuts and bolts topics like workplace safety to some of the most inspirational speakers you can imagine.
What an education. I ascribe probably 75% of any success I’ve ever had in business to that gig.
Jack Daly is one of the very good ones – I never had the pleasure to see him speak live, but over the years I’ve heard the best of the best and came away from each session inspired as you have.
One of the most interesting lessons of that era for me was after some years of hearing speaker after speaker that chewed up the stage with energy and talent and vocal skills – It was a rumple-suited very old gentleman of the oldest school in the world – the school of hard knocks – that impressed me the most.
Guy named Og Mandino.
He wrote a barely 100+ page book called the Greatest Salesman in the World – and watching him drape himself across a lectern and (hardly moving for nearly an hour) he had every single person in the packed audience hanging on every word he uttered from first to last by the power of the story under the delivery.
That guy was something.
If you ever get a call from an NSA member – that’s the National Speakers Association – and they want you to tape them. Its often worth doing that gig yourself.
My 2 cents anyway.
Oh, and ABSOLUTELY mission statements are hugely valuable business asset for clarifying thinking and keeping a team on the same path. I’d add to that having a 1 minute pitch MEMORIZED whenever someone asks “what do you do” (your elevator pitch) – and TELEPHONE skills for when you’re connected brain to brain with a decision maker.
This is the stuff that they don’t teach you in video school. And that’s a shame.
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One VERY common source of excessive HISS with mics is when a mic expecting Phantom power does NOT get that power. In that case, the signal the mic puts out will be so low that boosting it’s amplitude will also boost the noise floor and hiss will be significant.
The test is simple. Turn OFF the phantom power on your H4n. Plug a mic and listen. Then turn ON the phantom power. If the mic sounds the same, something is interfering with the delivery of the appropriate phantom power to the mic circuits.
That might be an improper ground, a bad battery connection, phantom applied OR wired to the wrong pins – but if you don’t get a HUGE change in the hiss level between phantom ON and phantom OFF setting on the same Phantom powered microphone – then one of the above is the issue.
Period.
Good luck.
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Our jobs can break down comfortably into 5 general areas.
Pre-production
Camera Work
Sound
Lighting
Post Production.I’ll go along with the contention that you can think about and even accomplish PRE – all by your own self (except for the client, of course.)
And you can even think about and even accomplish POST all by your own self if you”ve learned how to edit.
But if you’re shooting anything more complex than a talking head single person public speaking gig or a pre-defined story like a well-defined wedding or event ceremony – anyone who undertakes to do the three in the middle ALONE is a fool or is hack. You can’t direct, shoot, and monitor sound in real-time competently unless that represents ONE stream of idea content. Period. End of story.
If your shoot involves story – multiple characters – multiple cameras – or any complexity where decision making and choices are required in real-time – the production process gets too complex for a single brain.
So, yeah, there’s still “single shooter” stuff to do out there. But there’s only so much of that work available.
What we’re facing is that there will be many more “single shooters” in competition with their new DSLRs and FCP systems.
But the moment you add a second character or camera, or anything else complex enough to require coordination between production people in real time – the lowball guys will try their best – but they will inevitably fail. Not for lack or trying. Or from lack of talent. But from lack of experience. And fewer and fewer people are getting any experience in organizational video creation these days.
To me THAT is what’s fallen away in institutional video creation. They’ve gutted the middle ranks in the name of saving salary bucks in the short term.
The companies will TRY to go with an in-house shooter for a while. But they’ll rapidly find out that having GUT the middle management to save money for a while has left them with nobody with institutional wisdom available to check content or help craft tight scripts.
And those companies are flailing around like headless chickens. Just watch the posts here from newbies given the keys to the in-house production facility when the more expensive guy or gal has been shuffled out (likely precisely because their salary represented their actual experience!!)
But in the end, it will go back to the way it’s always been.
Because once again, the primary truth is that equipment doesn’t make effective videos – people do.
And believe me, the complexity of the message that needs to be communicated in this increasingly compelx world is NOT getting any simpler.
Patience is one of the most difficult of virtues to learn. And without a lot of cash in the bank, the most difficult to live without. But there it is.
My 2 cent’s worth, anyway.
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If you’re running a traditional “time clock” shop – well – all power to you.
I’ve simply never been able to do that. I still believe that tracking hours is a poor way to run a creative business. I guess that’s why I’m not in commercials space any longer. I don’t want to keep having to bill more hours just to make a landlord rich. I also don’t carry traditional employees any more. I pay for professional help. And I pay them their full card rates. There’s hardly ever OT in question because virtually EVERY shoot I do involves OT and it’s built into the rate.. Everyone who works on my shoots expects to be paid for a 10 hour stretch even if the shoot is done in 7. To me, that’s how you attract and keep the best crews.
As I’ve always said. when you base money on time, you reward the mediocre and slow and penalize the smart and fast.
Pay them for 10 hours – and don’t penalize them if they get it done in 7 – and the result is that the men and women who are both good and fast will pick your gig over one run by the guy who sends half the crew home at 3pm and then makes everyone else work harder, just to keep the OT column under control.
Different strokes – as they say.
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Yet another area in life where simplistic thinking just doesn’t do the job.
There are “editors” who are nothing more than button pushers. “Here – you’re an editor – take these 35 demo reels and edit them into a single review master.” – Nothing “creative” about that gig.
Then there are editors who win Academy Awards who’s contributions are often every bit as “artistic” as the costume designers and the best directors.
So sorry, but the right answer is always going to be “it depends.”
Life would be ever so much easier if decisions could be constrained to black and white. Sometimes on the set I *yearn* for black and white decisions. Just ONCE I’d love somebody to hold up a sign that said “Hey Bill, go ahead and give this actor another TAKE – he has a better performance in him” or “Hey Bill, cut your losses, this is the best you’re going to get right now. – move on.”
But life’s not like that is it? You want a “rule” for whether to pay overtime or not? That would certainly be nice. But any rule you make will likely screw things up in MANY if not MOST of the situations you apply it to. Why? Because the possible reasonable exceptions to any RULE ebb and flow with the circumstances it’s applied to – and without judgement and flexibility, common sense and experience mixed into a constantly morphing stew of circumstance that you can judge occurrence by occurrence – living life or doing business simply according to “the rules” is sterile and banal and too often, ineffective.
Just like in decisions in real life.
Sorry.
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Guys, you’re missing the point.
He’s making a MUSIC video, for heaven’s sake! And here you are guiding him to simple professional lenses that are used all the time to get sweet, clear, appropriate video of stuff? How lame is that!
Dude, you need the weirdest, least stock lenses you can find. Find a big photo house with a LOT of lenses – then grab the ones with the MOST DUST on them. Seriously
9 mm F11 Korean knockoff of a terrible Japanese super fisheye with massive vignetting? FABULOUS!
Broken Russian tilt-shift lens that requires five adaptor rings to step up or down from the actual lens mount – GROOVY!
Snorkle lens that the last renter failed to realize did not mean the device should be used underwater – and so the thing leaked and the interior glass is now coated with algae and small shelled creatures? MAKE ROOM ON YOUR SHELF RIGHT AWAY FOR THE MOON MAN, DUDE!You’re in the land where screw-ups are “artistic choices” and when things go terribly, horribly, embarrassingly wrong – if you just keep your mouth firmly shut and wait a few years, you can bet they’ll be studying your “technique” in film school classes.
Have fun.